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Let Them Eat Khan Academy
theodp writes "Connie Ballmer announced that Seattle's Lakeside School and nine other private schools have formed the Global Online Academy to enhance learning opportunities for students at the elite institutions, some of which charge upwards of $35,000 in tuition and count the likes of Bill Gates, President Obama, Steve Case, Mitt Romney, and Sean Lennon as alums. 'Independent schools have traditionally struggled with how to provide their education models and resources to a wider student population in order to serve a public purpose,' Ballmer explained. 'While the initial classes will be for students at member schools only there is potential to share them with a broader community and help narrow the disparity of educational opportunity.' In the meantime, there's always Khan Academy."
Here's hoping this will be successful. Meanwhile, is there a complete, online, free curriculum?
One which would tell you, like maybe in a lesson-plan format, what to teach everyday? Say, either for a homeschool, rural school, or independent school (religious/hippie/whatever)?
The resources here seem incomplete:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_curriculum
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
...I would start with the issue of eliminating the employment of multiple choice questions in the sciences and mathematics.
This move in my opinion, would encourage students to deliberately show the working (read steps) as they solve these questions.
What we have these days is a situation in which students are encouraged by the knowledge that they can guess their way through an exam and it has not helped.
My approach would reward 'small marks' for each step shown to be relevant in solving a number. This approach is better. What do you think?
you mean like most other countries?
What a mind blowing idea ;p
I don't see the 'disparity' as much of educational opportunity as economic opportunity. Look at all the college graduates who can not find a decent job.
The gap between the super rich and the poor & middle class is very large, and getting bigger. This is the real disparity.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Is this posted for information only or is there a point?
One of my college physics professors had a novel solution for using scan-trons for easy grading while avoiding the multiple choice dilemma. Instead of selecting from a series of 4 or 5 choices to choose from, he gave us scan-tron sheets with the columns of numbers from 0-9 like the ones you see when you fill out your social security numbers. You work out your physics problem and then input the number on 3 or 4 columns.
It's a great way to make exams easy to grade while avoiding multiple choice. We always had our physics exam grades back the next class for that class.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
That doesn't automatically give it merit just because it's foreign.
But yes, like some other places too.
Gosh, you mean being at a private school that can cherry-pick its students just isn't enough? And serving a public purpose? What the hell? It certainly serves nobody but the elites themselves.
Yeah, I know, it's not talking about public schools, it's the ancient concept of noblesse oblige. They see themselves as uniquely progressive, and take this wonderfully noble obligation upon themselves to "better" the rest of us. Anyone ever think that the rest of us might have "better" lives if elites just left us the fuck alone?
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-- C.S. Lewis
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Color me cynical, but somehow I get the feeling that institutions whose clientele are exclusively the super-rich do not have a real stake in trying to minimize the disparity between their clients and the less fortunate. They may put up something "for everyone" for its PR value, but I wouldn't be surprised if at the same time they're emphasizing to their paying customers how much better is the education their kids are getting.
This is in contrast with private universities, which are also terribly expensive, but which have a tradition of valuing education for its social benefits. Even these universities may one day get to the point where they feel economically threatened by the free material they post (for example MIT's OpenCourseWare) --- for example, if a new demographic of students starts to appear which demand to pay less but only to be tested and certified for their degrees, because the free educational material available is good enough for them.
Incidentally, here's the professor:
http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~croft/FARADAY.HTML
Awesome dude. For the last 14 years, he's given the annual Faraday Christmas Children's Lecture where he messes around with physics experiments like jetting around on rollerblades and a 50 pound fire extinguisher and having a cinder block broken on his chest while laying on a bed of nails.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Ideal system, but collapses depending on three situations. First, a student:teacher ratio that a good teacher just lacks the time to grade this way. Second, a lazy teacher. Three, a school/system that wants clear cut answers.
A modified version of what the SATs, if my memory is right, could work though by merging that and your idea to allow multiple choice to work.
1) Correct answer: +X points
2) Incorrect answer: -X points (not simply 0).
3) Blank answer: Indication to look at work sheet, +(Y%)X points based on the teacher looking at the work.
Obama kids as current students. I don't think President Obama attended any of those schools....
Threatened is right.
The entire point of education is to administer the knowledge with a series of proofs that the students learned it (let's ignore gaming the system for now.)
Knowledge huh? That should be cheap. The inbound material consists of books and podcasts! And a college degree is a very finite series of classes, so it can't really be that hard for $State_School to post a curriculum for all the courses that don't require crazy equipment. Then all the student needs is Q&A sessions, and the administered tests. Price tag per semester: $500.
So then the Elites have to step it up to show where that other $200,000 is going.
Yet we're well into the Music and Movie content debates, how has Edu remained this far below the radar?
The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I LOL'ed:
Yes, there is something truly magical about being able to hold tuition down to $35,000 per year when you have backing from two Microsoft founders. Good job, fundraisers!
Meanwhile, is there a complete, online, free curriculum?
For all years K-12, in all sovereign states' official languages? Not yet, but we can hop on Wikibooks to start making the textbooks as a first step, and once those are fini^W "featured", we can add lesson plans.
The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network.
Not really. You're making the mistake of thinking that universities actually care about their undergrads. They only care about them insofar as every undergrad is a potential slave^H^H^H^H^H postgrad student waiting-to-happen. The exception to this would likely consist only of those schools which charge upwards of 100k/year/student, as that money would likely surpass grant funding.
In order to revolutionize undergrad programs you'd have to first change the way the peer-review system works and how organizations like DARPA/NSF/etc... hand out grants. While awesome, Khan academy knockoffs aren't going to cut it in that respect.
That may work in some simpler degrees, but many degrees require hands on work and experience as well. This can't be handled through books and podcasts. Do you really want your Doctors, your Engineers and your Nuclear Scientists learning from books on tape before they go out and start operating on you, building your bridges and running your nuclear reactors?
AJ Henderson
Judging from the -1 moderation that the three Khaaaaan comments made thus far have already garnered, I'd say that there is a moderator out there who either hates Star Trek or who found that someone had pissed in his Wheaties, or I suppose it is possible that he hates Start Trek and found that someone had pissed in his Wheaties.
I had one who gave the wickedest "multiple choice" questions ever. Every single question had the following options:
(a) A
(b) B
(c) C
(d) D
(e) A and B
(f) A and C
(g) A and D
and so on...
Of course, that doesn't work so well for math problems, but he was a psych prof.
Its nice to see somebody doing the "putting up" part of "put up or shut up" these days.
I personally hated showing my work in school, I've always been good with numbers and could do a good percentage of the questions in my head.
Having to write down steps was just a hassle and slowed me down.
Granted, there were plenty of problems where I did have to write them out, but I would rather have the option over being forced.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Punahou left lasting impression on Obama: Long before he became Barack Obama -- junior senator from Illinois and presidential candidate -- he was just Barry, the good-natured, unassuming kid. He loved basketball. He loved books. He always wore a smile. He got along with everyone. He did not come from privilege, but was able to attend the exclusive Punahou School based on his achievement and with the help of financial aid.
"The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network."
The "Old Boys" network has a key advantage. Their parents actually care and can fully provide for the welfare of their children. The problem with Public Education is the fact that there is this crazy idea that "All kids should be saved and are worthy to go to college" The problem is School isn't always fun and most children do not have the ability to self motivate themselves to do well in school. There are a lot of parents who think education is a wast and use the schools as a baby sitting service. Other parents do not have the resources to help their children. Private school aren't any better then public schools however the parents tend to pressure the children to perform better. If you take all the kids out of a snotty upper crust public school and put them in the poorest inner city school, and all the kids of the inner city school into the upper crust public school I doubt you will see any meaningful change in the child's education.
I would argue the schools will need to be more selective. If by high school they should be strongly pressured (not forced) to go to vocational training if they don't have what it takes, so they are trained for the workforce in 4 years. The A and B students will then continue onto High school, where the distractive elements of kids who really don't want to be there, is reduced thus can focus more on education and college.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I am a current high school math teacher.
The solution you propose doesn't help so much with the problem of multiple choice tests. The goal is to understand what the student knows. If a student makes a sign error at the beginning of the test, but does all of the steps correctly, this student knows a lot about the problem. Without actually looking at the work, I don't know how to tell this.
Another example is systematic error. Suppose the student doesn't understand rounding rules, or switches x and y. Again, looking at the work and I can tell much more about what the student knows.
In my college the math, physics, engineering, etc departments never used scan-trons, at least not in any class I ever took. For most of the courses it's not a problem to grade by the next day since there's one, maybe two sections and maybe 50 students at the most (although I've seen as few as 6 including myself). However, in courses such as calculus and physics with hundreds of students they still managed to grade all of these exams by the next day. The exams were basically 8-10 pages long with one question with multiple parts per page and a bunch of blank space to answer. The exams were divided up amongst the graders and grad students who helped with the recitation and lab portions of the course.
Strangely some of my other courses such as psychology, sociology, and similar did use scan-tron sheets. I never got the grades the next day since the scan-tron machine was clogged up.
God, I used to hate having to show my work in math classes. While I get why teachers liked this (it showed you understood the process and weren't just cheating), it drove me crazy because it discouraged creative thinking. I was always coming up with shortcuts and ways to arrive more efficiently at an answer. But I would loose points if I didn't do it the "correct" way. This kind of conformity is why I lost interest in conventional mathematics and went into programming instead. In programming, I actually get rewarded for coming up with shortcuts and ways to make my solutions more efficient (most of the time anyway).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've taken science classes where the tests were scantrons, but the bubbles were numbered 0-9. The instructions: "Solve the problem, then bubble in the first significant digit of the answer." Best of both worlds.
Combining several threads at once, it still works to slice a good year off the "general ed requirements" for those professions, and the lecture courses thereafter. Meanwhile, it gets into the "degree subsidization" of those professions by the English majors. That would force a collision with the other stories that we are giving away our engineering knowledge for free to the Chinese and reducing the US jobs for those degrees.
My original post meant that for the simpler degrees, if we convince the employers that X degree is good enough to hire, it tackles the "you don't have the piece of paper" problem. ... Which lastly collides with the Babysitting Service crew.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
like all /. readers, I scanned the article, picked up only the keywords 'Ballmer ' and 'Khan' and hence I feel compelled to make a comment about someone throwing a chair while yelling 'KHAAAaaaan!'
Thanks for your attention.
I personally hated showing my work in school, I've always been good with numbers and could do a good percentage of the questions in my head
This. Brain is RAM, paper is swap space - I'm quite happy to use paper when there's too much going on at once to concentrate on all of it, but other than that it's just slower
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Yeah, agreed for that. Certainly a lot of courses that are taught as lectures really do not need to be. Personally, I'm not an academic and would prefer something more along the line of apprenticeship for professional fields. I've never liked the whole lecture mentality in favor of hands on and dynamic education. I don't learn well from blanket presentation of material and learn much better from actually doing and I think this is true of many people. So yeah, I agree that general education stuff that doesn't really have a hands on application can be easily taught for effectively free and think that anything beyond that should be more hands on and dynamic. The costs would then be associated with the skill level of the people you are learning from (and therefore the value of the skill you are learning if you have the ability to match the level of skill.)
AJ Henderson
My sister teaches math at a small college. A student came to her aghast that she must show her work. When she explained the reasons it was necessary, she took her issue to the head of the math department. When that didn't work she kept moving up the chain of command, eventually talking to the president of the college. When the president backed the teacher, the student dropped out of college.
I am forever glad my high school math teacher not only forced us to show our work, but work without calculators unless we really needed them (i.e. trig functions).
For what it's worth, IAAMT who has worked with ALEKS and Khan Academy.
The Khan Academy videos aren't bad, but they're really just textbooks that move and talk.
The Khan Academy mastery exercises aren't bad, but they're really just worksheets of arbitrary length. The instant feedback is pretty cool, but it's just a faster way of doing a worksheet and then checking against the teacher's key.
The instant feedback for a teacher isn't bad, and it makes monitoring student progress more efficient, and making tasks more efficient is the bailiwick of software engineering. That said, throwing Khan Academy (or ALEKS or other similar program) at students will get you pretty much the same result as tossing them a textbook and some worksheets.
Well, tough. I say this as somebody that has spent a lot of time tutoring math and science students, and doing things in your head is a really, really bad habit to get into when you're being asked for an exact answer rather than just an estimate. The reason being that if you do make a mistake, there's absolutely no way that you'll ever identify it and the likelihood of getting any partial credit is zero. What's worse is that the teacher then has no means by which to understand where that answer came from unless it's a common mistake.
But, beyond that, it's just good form to write out each step carefully and put a single line through a the numbers if the step was wrong, that way at least you learn something in cases where you make a mistake. That's not going to happen if you're doing things in your head.
My precalculus teacher in high school had
E) None of the above
as the fifth choice for every single problem on the test.
Sorry that you missed the point of college, but I can only think of a few classes that I took where replacing the professor with a book would have been even half as effective. Human professors (the decent ones, anyway) do a lot more than just open student's skulls and pour in facts. A good professor will foster critical thinking, discussions, and will welcome challenges to intellectual authority. Show me a book that can do all of that, and we can start talking about learning.
As to where the money for your tuition is going? Simple--it's subsidizing your professor's research, and paying for the rest of the campus experience. Surprisingly enough, just like with everything else in life, you get what you pay for. If you want the best professors, you're going to have to pay them a lot of money, because if you don't, someone else will. The best professors also want to work on the most interesting problems, which are often some of the most expensive problems to work on.
I like the idea of reversing the way that most classrooms work today by watching video lectures at home, and then doing homework assignments in the classroom with the teacher available for help (http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html). During school I always had a hard time paying attention to all day lectures which may go too fast or slow for me depending on the topic. Watching the lecture at home would give the chance to pause, rewind, take a break and get a snack, look something up in the book, etc. Then doing the assignment in class you have the teacher there to help if you get stuck or have a question, and you can easily help, or get help from, the other students.
Showing steps has its drawbacks too. It biases things towards specific mechanics chosen for either pedagogical purposes or ease of marking rather than practicality or insight. I'll illustrate this with an anecdote.
Many years ago when I was at MIT, there was a guy in the dorm who always finished his problems sets in a fraction of the time of the rest of us, although he sometimes got marked down for not "showing his work". It turned out he could perform many astonishing feats of algebra in his head. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused, so I questioned him about this. He said he never learned the "proper" ways of doing things because they were so tedious. It was so much easier just to see the answer. Yet while he was intelligent enough, apart from math he didn't seem like a superhuman genius. He'd simply worked out algorithms for doing things that didn't require a lot of working memory, either in his head or (like the rest of us) using paper as supplementary memory. He'd turned a kind of corner in algebra, like the one when you're learning a foreign language and start to think in it instead of translating word by word and puzzling over book grammar. I lost track with this guy after college, and I've often wished that I'd thought to write down the "tricks" he had for simplifying algebra so I could make them available to the world.
The point of this story isn't that the educational system should be built around the needs of rare individuals like this. It's that it's important for teachers to know their students as individuals. A teacher should be intimately familiar with each student's strengths and weaknesses, and use that knowledge to guide students to mastery of the subject, rather than verifying that the student goes through the same standardized set of motions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network.
Empty rhetorical nonsense.
Who's Steve Case, Mitt Romney, and Sean Lennon and why should i be interested?
Southern Harmon Institute of Technology. That place is the shit, I tell you!
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
"The Edu Revolution is coming, and it's going to scare the Old Boys network."
The "Old Boys" network has a key advantage. Their parents actually care and can fully provide for the welfare of their children. The problem with Public Education is the fact that there is this crazy idea that "All kids should be saved and are worthy to go to college" The problem is School isn't always fun and most children do not have the ability to self motivate themselves to do well in school. There are a lot of parents who think education is a wast and use the schools as a baby sitting service. Other parents do not have the resources to help their children. Private school aren't any better then public schools however the parents tend to pressure the children to perform better. If you take all the kids out of a snotty upper crust public school and put them in the poorest inner city school, and all the kids of the inner city school into the upper crust public school I doubt you will see any meaningful change in the child's education.
I would argue the schools will need to be more selective. If by high school they should be strongly pressured (not forced) to go to vocational training if they don't have what it takes, so they are trained for the workforce in 4 years. The A and B students will then continue onto High school, where the distractive elements of kids who really don't want to be there, is reduced thus can focus more on education and college.
I agree with this. Other developed countries, notably Germany and Japan have similar models. The German model of education seems IMO the best for preparing kids either professionally and vocationally in a manner that is meaningful for both students and society. That is what we need.
What we currently have in the US is a system with a 12-year long baby-sitting system that, upon exit, gives a kid the choice of flipping burgers or go to a 4-year college. It completely ignores vocational training. Vocational training is the foundation to a solid, self-reliant and enterpreneurial blue collar working class. We do not have that at all.
The reaction to Khan and his incredible resources is universal: People applaud and cheerfully encourage him to "keep going"
Now imagine if the reaction to Linus Torvalds had been the same in 1993. "Neato, Linus! More please! You're really awesome to have done all this yourself!"
Luckily for the world, that was not the reaction to the release of the Linux source code back then. People were like "Yeah, this is a great start, now let me add something to this so that we can build this into a fully functioning system." To be fair, Linus openly encouraged this and provided a framework for volunteer contributions. Khan doesn't do that, but does nothing to discourage it.
Yeah, his lessons are the work of one man, but already, they contain like 5% of a full curriculum of education. With 19 other Khans working in their spare time, we could finish the job and release "curriculum 1.0". Then, hopefully, many other Khans would work on augmenting and improving it. But it's almost shocking to me that something this important and easy is not being done. There might even be money in it for a company that releases free/openly licensed teaching material and then administers for-pay achievement tests or certification tests. If this were done right, it would be the obviously right path for gifted students, homeschoolers, and people who lack access to good traditional schools. They could go through the material at their own pace and take certification tests as quickly as they work through the material. Wise governments would even offer them a refund for the cost of tests they passed. It's much cheaper than the same government paying to "school" them.
Parents willing to pay for these schools have high expectations for their children. Some kids are brilliant by birth. Most are brilliant by good mentoring. And parents are the most readily available mentors.
Kids in the US generally do poorly because we just want them to feel good about themselves, even if they stink at math. Parents of many countries expect A's, not C's. The parents who pay for these schools expect A's, and they don't expect to get them by passing failing kids and rubber stamping A's.
I8-D
Were you able to then "tigthen" the points to get your grade increased?
You and Mike Rowe agree (speech in front of commerce committee regarding the trend to disregard vocational training in the US): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_pp8CHEQ0
The recent trolling article headlines were becoming too obvious.
So the new /. strategy is to post summaries with no real point, but which point out some observation on the rich, the elite, or "the man" in general. A multitude of slashdotters are bound to be offended by the very existence of these elites, and so the rants begin again. Mission accomplished.
If you are really a high school teacher, then you are probably teaching at least five classes a day with around 30 students each. That means you have a hundred thirty tests to grade. At the end of the day you're going to be thinking more about how to get through grading as quickly as possible.
The logical way is to do multiple choice tests. You can combine it with checking the students who did poorly, to see if you can figure out what their problem was (since you can require them to show their work).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My teachers did it Differently(tm).
You chose to show your work, or didn't. If you got the right answer, full marks regardless. If you didn't, but showed your work and it was a simple error, a small point loss (the amount depended on the error - stupid errors started counting more as the term went on in an attempt to train students to be more careful). If you didn't show work at all, a zero.
Bonus points if you know of another way to estimate the answer to show you're in the right ballpark. Even if all you did was work out what the sign of the answer should be.
Oh yeah, and if you want to contest your mark, you had to write your answer on the paper in *PEN*. You could use pencil, but if there was a grading mistake, tough. And neatness counts - no big splotches of crossed out ink - you are allowed some mess, but it had to be neatly crossed out and not excessive. You were allowed to use scratch paper to do rough work which you transferred neatly to the test paper for big problems. Smaller problems you were confident on were done right then and there, but less confident answers you did on scratch paper first.
And yes, there was the standard time pressure. The goal being it's also about time management. Some made it particularly fun by giving every question the same weight.
wow slashdot, you pissed off khaaan.com. good job...
Presumably there is some middle ground to be found. For example, pose a question that involves a series of intermediate steps and make each step multi-choice, or write a value in a box. The only thing that sucks is that the student is forced to do the calculation in one specific way, so it hardly allows expression of understanding of anything other than the algorithm they have learned rote, but it seems to me that there is a place for rote learning among other styles.
Nullius in verba
"I would argue the schools will need to be more selective. If by high school they should be strongly pressured (not forced) to go to vocational training if they don't have what it takes, so they are trained for the workforce in 4 years."
You assume that the US will have a "workforce" when in reality all those jobs are either outsourced overseas or insourced by cheap foreign labor.
This is a great idea. As usual all innovation is in the private sector. The government should quit the education business and switch to a voucher system.
This is a good point. If more teachers were more like you, a lot of the problems problems with the education system (maybe even the need for standardized testing) would go away. The important thing about testing is figuring out which students needed help with which concepts. That's why things like pop quizzes and homework should be done. Not to give Timmy padding on his GPA, but to use as a diagnostic tool by a good teacher.
I have tutored several students, and some of the common practices in grading are awful. Having kids grade each others homework, and using scantrons totally misses the point: assignments, tests, and even grades themselves should serve to help kids learn. Sometimes my tutoring students would have some misunderstanding that is easy to fix. Not reading the instructions and dropping off negative signs were pretty common mistakes that just took a little bit of training.
That seems like a reasonable compromise. The ease of scantrons, and the educational value of an actual check.
I've attended two high schools, three colleges and one graduate school and I've never seen a math test with multiple choice questions. Other sciences could benefit from this approach, though.
Showing your work also demonstrates that you didn't get the answer by having someone else text it to you.
When I was a computer science prof, I encountered this problem all the time. It usually boils down to the fact that grad student TA's often only know of one way to solve a problem, and will downgrade if they don't see it. I was always willing to take a second look at these cases.
The student in question should have taken it to the prof.
When I was in grad school, I had a situation where I thought it was obvious that an particular equation could be rewritten in another, more convenient, form. But when a professor called me out of it, I spent a day trying to do the transformation and came up with nothing. I had intuited the correct answer without really understanding the central problem. Which is a easy mistake for smart people to make when they're not in the habit of showing their work.
I had a professor who would have True/False tests where you had to justify your answer. You could answer either true or false to the question as long as long as your justification was correct.
That's really not an analogous situation. This guy *was* showing his work, he was using sound but non-standard algorithms, which a few minutes watching him work would demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt. That's not the same as acting on a hunch you can't justify.
Yes, there are real world situations where using less than optimal but standard procedures is required. Laboratory work, for example. No doubt there is always some better way to perform a lab analysis, but consistency is paramount when amassing data. Still, in the real world, *quickness* at reaching a solution also matters a great deal, provided the methods are sound and justifiable.
Now I've seen the assignments given in elementary, middle and high school, and there is a huge premium placed on making them easy to grade, perhaps a higher premium than on educational value. And that *is* a problem. I'm not against requiring that work be shown; on the contrary. But like every other good idea it is subject to abuse and should be tempered by common sense.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
granted, but some people work intuitively, not via a blindly learned set of steps. these people are hurt by tests that demand every step be shown.
The whole things kind of points out that our society is over educated, while ironically still being undereducated. What I mean by that is that the is a not insignificant gap between being a functional, useful member of society, and being someone that will help drive society forward.
Most people don't need, and really don't end up better than an 8th grade education. These people are not bad or useless. Many of them really don't care to learn more than that. They spend 13 years in public education, then another 4, 6, or even 8 years in college to use what they knew in the 8th grade. It is a waste of human life. Not the people, but the 6-10 years they spend NOT getting anything useful from their 'education'.
While that happens, those that would push society forward are running through the same system that is designed to handle first set. Being educated is not considered a desirable trait in our society. Being 'Degreed' is. Heck, I had a cousin that was severely retarded. Her mental age never reached above that of a 5 year old. Her mother sure was proud when she graduated from college though.
You mean flipping burgers, or going to a 4-year college before starting their burger flipping career.
I grew up in Oklahoma and attended Oklahoma public schools up until high school, when I went to Groton School. The difference was stark. For example, 8th grade math in Oklahoma was still focused on basic arithmetic. (I really wish I was making that up, but I'm not.) By the time I graduated from Groton I managed to get a 5 on the AP calculus exam.
Prior to attending Groton I coudn't write worth a damn. Groton fixed that too.
But most important thing I learned there was, basically, how to think - the self-discipline needed to properly organize and express my thoughts and ideas.
Now, as for your little list.Maybe I didn't take the right classes or something, but I'm fairly sure I didn't learn enough of that "tak the talk" thing at Groton to matter - when it came time to get serious about business relations for our startup company, we went outside and hired a "suit" to do that.
As for friends helping out, I cannot recall a single instance after graduating when I asked a fellow Groton alum for help.
And as for that self-importance thing - let me just point out Groton's motto: Cui servire est regnare.
Now, I have no doubt there are private schools that provide what you describe and little else. But not all of them are like that.
If you are really a high school teacher, then you are probably teaching at least five classes a day with around 30 students each. That means you have a hundred thirty tests to grade.
Please select the correct answer for the following:
5*30 = ?
a. 130
b. 150
c. Squirrel!
d. Irony
The problem extends to adults too. This raises some obvious suggestions about what should be thought ASAP.
But how to effectively taught self-manipulation?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In the real world, it almost never matters whether you're right or not, as long as you can bullshit convincingly.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.